•Showing how knowledge management can be used and renovate urban governance.•Integration of urban planning into the knowledge society.•Importance of geospatial rules.•Encoding geospatial rules. The concepts of smart city cannot be understood without examining their links with the knowledge society. In this kind of society, knowledge must be considered as a capital shared not only with experts, but also with citizens, within the target of sustainable development. After studying those concepts, the scope is to examine how human knowledge and artificial intelligence can be combined in geographic knowledge systems, essentially based on machine-processable knowledge and the concept of rules. Several geospatial rules are detailed in order to distinguish several categories implying locational issues. Then, a general structure for geographic knowledge base systems is given together with some fundamental elements for an infrastructure in which human collective intelligence is a key-element. To conclude this paper, a research agenda is given to integrate urban and regional management into the knowledge society.